• Giovanni Bruno-  Heretic or Scientist

    Born Filippo Bruno in Nola in the Kingdom of Naples in 1548.  A precocious student, Bruno eventually found himself in the regional capital as a Dominican friar.  The Dominicans had the best university, but were very orthodox and unimaginative.  This did not sit well with Bruno, who was a very innovative thinker as well as being extremely cantankerous.  He often called his fellow friars “asses”. In his cell at San Domenico Maggiore, he stripped imaged of the Virgin of the walls saying it was idolatry.  This put him on his superior’s bad list as a possible Protestant.  Then he brilliantly defended the Arian heresy to a professor.  Bruno’s name was…

  • Dr. John Snow-  The father of modern epidemiology

    Clean water is essential for life.  Without it, we die quickly of horrible diseases.  As modern life progressed, our cities got dirtier and dirtier.  Cities realized quickly they needed to do something to get the streets cleaner.  In 1858, the city of Chicago even had all of its buildings lifted four feet to make room for a sewer.  Other cities followed suit, which was good.  One problem.  Most of the sewers emptied into water sources.  The water in Chicago, for example, was so bad that dead fish would show up in bath water.  Residents nicknamed their water “chowder”.  The introduction of the flush toilet made the water supply worse.  It…

  • The Hubble Space Telescope

    "It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble Scope." -Tom HanksHubble was funded in the 1970s, with a proposed launch in 1983, but the project was plagued by technical delays, budget problems, and the Challenger disaster.It was finally launched into low Earth orbit in 1990, and to this day remains in operation. The telescope is named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble.With a 7.9 ft mirror, Hubble's fo [...]

  • Memories of the Challenger Disaster

    There were rows of metal folding chairs in the gymnasium of our elementary school. The little kids were jumping around and excited. I was 12 and in 5th grade and our class much too old and cool for such foolishness, but we were excited too. Teachers shushed us and moved us into our assigned seats and the television was rolled out and turned on for us to watch the countdown.President Reagan had said the first civilian in space should be a teacher. The search for the perfect teacher went on for m [...]

  • Tycho Brahe- Death by Manners

    He was born Tyge Ottesen Brahe on December 14, 1546 in Skane, Denmark, now Sweden, to parents from the Danish nobility. When he was two, his uncle, Jørgen Thygesen Brahe, took him from his parents and raised him to adulthood. Brahe later wrote “without the knowledge of my parents [he] took me away with him while I was in my earliest youth to become a scholar”. Perhaps this was a fostering arrangement, however, it was strange that his parents made no move to get back their young son. One story says that the Brahe’s had promised a son to Jørgen Thygesen Brahe to raise and had not kept their promise,…